An essay for the Masters module Political Economy of the Anthropocene supervised by Dr Nick Taylor. It asks: How might ‘tokenisation’ strategies within voluntary carbon and ecosystem services markets provide insights into the financialisation of solutions to climate breakdown?

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In 2014 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released an assessment report (AR5) which found that ‘anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions’ (GHGs) have reached concentrations “unprecedented in at least the last 800,000 years.” The report found that such GHGs are extremely likely to have been the dominant cause of observed warming since the mid-20th century, which is itself, they write, “unprecedented over decades to millennia”, contributing to widespread impact on human and natural systems. (IPCC, 2014) Informed by this report, and the political pressure that others like it provoked, in December 2015 195 nations adopted the Paris Agreement of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The treaty set a series of goals for this party of nation states, the most central of which being to limit global warming to below 2°C (preferably 1.5°C) compared to pre-industrial levels through ‘low greenhouse gas emissions’ and ‘climate-resilient’ development. Importantly, in its headline summary of objectives, the UNFCCC notes that it will aim to achieve this by “making finance flows consistent” with such a developmental pathway – mobilizing ‘climate finance’ to support adaptation to, and mitigation against, the adverse effects of climate change. (UNFCCC, 2015)

Versions of this story, centring on the Paris Agreement and a ‘goal’ of 1.5 to 2°C warming, appear as a preface to – or justification of – almost every discussion or proposal on the mitigation of climate change. One such example – which will be the starting point of my investigation here – appeared in late 2020, when the ‘Taskforce on Scaling Voluntary Carbon Markets’ (TSVCM) was initiated by former governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney. The taskforce describes itself as a way of ‘scaling’ what they describe as “an effective and efficient voluntary carbon market to help meet the goals of the Paris Agreement.” (TSVCM, 2020).

However, in adopting this narrativization of climate breakdown such responses also inherit a collection of scientific, political, and even philosophical discourses which centre around ideas of ‘green growth’ and the ‘marketisation’ or ‘financialisation of nature’ (evident already in the UNFCCC’s somewhat ambiguous concepts of ‘climate-resilient development’ and ‘climate finance’). For the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), ‘green growth’ is understood as a practice of “fostering economic growth and development, while ensuring that natural assets continue to provide the resources and environmental services on which our well-being relies” (Jacobs, 2013, p. 198). This definition in-turn relies upon an understanding of nature which, as Sian Sullivan writes, “humanity can do business with”; primarily through the metaphorical fabrication of ‘natural capital’ or the ‘natural capital asset’. (Sullivan, 2018; Levidow, 2020).

In effect, the concept of ‘natural capital’ attempts to “reduce the environment to standard measures of resource accounting” as in the practice of ‘natural capital accounting’ (NCA) (Levidow, 2020). At a more fundamental level however, borrowing from Michel Callon and Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory (ANT), we might say it also seeks to construe the ‘enactments’ of nature and of economy as commensurable _within a relational network of human and non-human actors (Sullivan, 2018; Asdal, 2008). ANT’s philosophical perspective seeks to problematise an understanding of ‘nature’ as distinct from ‘society’ (Latour, 2005) and describes the economic life of its human and non-human actors as a set of mutually-determined performances (as opposed to containing inherent characteristics) which are framed by ‘economics at large’ (_i.e., the study of economy as well practices of accounting and marketing) (MacKenzie, 2009). ANT then attempts to tackle, at least in part, what Jason Moore has described as the ‘epistemic rift’ introduced by capitalism and its ‘ontological praxis’: “a rift in our understanding about how human organizations are embedded in nature.” (Moore, 2017)

The introduction of a concept of ‘natural capital’ is then one such way of rendering the performative actions of natural processes – understood as ‘environmental services’ or ‘ecosystem services’ (ES) – as legible and therefore calculable and investable _within a pre-existing capitalist economy, as is implied in the OECD’s definition of green growth and desired by the UNFCCC’s ‘climate-resilient’ development. As Jessica Dempsey writes on this ‘desire’ propelling natural capital and ecosystem services, such economistic valuations of nature aim to create “a kind of commensurability that all people – from bureaucrats to finance ministers to farmers to you and me – can recognize.” (Dempsey, 2016) In the language of those finance ministers in particular – who take a favourable view of the ability of markets to deliver positive environmental outcomes – the issue then becomes one of _pricing: “internalizing the externalities of environmental pollution that producers are currently able to pass on to society.” (Jacobs, 2013)

There are, of course, many critiques that can be made of ‘green growth’, ‘natural capital’ and ‘ecosystem services’, as well as their conceptions of the natural environment informed by this particular reading of ANT. Sullivan, for example, writes on the ‘cultural’ and ‘critical poverty’ of a worldview which imagines nature simply as a ‘service-provider’ and resorts to money or pricing as the “mediator of our relationships with the non-human world” (Sullivan, 2009). Viewed as a technique of ‘monetary valuation’ such concepts can be said to prefigure commodification as a reasonable response to climate breakdown, framing the society-nature relationship as one of ‘utility and exchange’, and facilitating new forms of enclosure, privatisation, deregulation, accumulation, and marketization (Kallis, et al., 2013).

From this perspective such concepts may serve to outline, or indeed justify, what many have come to describe as a process of ‘neoliberalizing’ nature. In addition to a focus on ‘pricing nature’, critics of ‘neoliberal natures’ highlight environmental governance strategies that centre on the depoliticization of “mutual dependencies, societal conflicts, and power inequalities around natural resources” (Levidow, 2020) as well as the “off-loading [of] responsibilities to the private sector and/or civil society groups” (Castree, 2008). A response to the climate crisis which generates ‘climate-finance’ through voluntary payments for the ecosystem services (PES) provided to human-systems by so-called natural capital assets might then be understood as one such example of a ‘depoliticized’ or ‘privatized’ approach.

However, there are others who take a more ambivalent or ‘promiscuous’ view of these concepts and their ostensibly neoliberal underpinnings. (Bakker, 2010; Dempsey, 2016; Lane, 2012) Following ANT’s understanding of political-economy, Donald MacKenzie notes that if the characteristics of ‘capitalism’ are similarly extrinsic, then it may be altered by ‘changing the calculative mechanisms that constitute it.’ In this case MacKenzie is discussing carbon markets; specifically, how the capacity to price the negative externalities of GHGs constitutes “an attempt to change the construction of capitalism’s central economic metric: profit and loss” and is, as such, an intentional ‘politics of market design’. (MacKenzie, 2009) This political dimension of environmental(ist) market design is extended by Dempsey in her view of ecosystem services as a kind of ‘interest-producing machine.’ For her, the concept of ecosystem services can be productively viewed as a kind of political‐scientific strategy, _one _which has the capacity to bring ecosystems to the political table through the production of an _‘interest’_ in them; interests which can recognize the ‘multiple rationalities and logics at play.’ (Dempsey, 2016)

Returning to Carney, it is within this strongly contested ‘politics of market design’ that the recently-founded TSVCM has been set up. In briefly detailing the literature surrounding actor-network theory, natural capital assets, ecosystem-services (and payments for ecosystem-services) – as well as critical positions taken within these concepts – I hope to have outlined at least one core understanding or ‘version’ of nature that this taskforce and other similar interventions believe they can do business with and within.

The founding of this taskforce is useful as a starting point because it signals the anticipated direction of travel for ‘institutional environmentalism’ within these debates. The TSVCM estimates that the voluntary carbon market sector – which facilitates the voluntary offsetting of ‘unavoidable’ GHGs, often through PES schemes – will need to grow at least ‘15-fold’ by 2030, with McKinsey projecting a market size of between $5 billion and $30 billion (Blaufelder, et al., 2021). Regardless therefore of whether one accepts the tenets of such an approach, it is crucial to seriously examine proposals that emerge within this rapidly growing field. The stakes for doing so are at once empirical and scientific, concerning the viability and sustainability of both human and natural ecosystems; as well as epistemic and socio-political, concerning the ‘society-nature relationship’ outlined above, along with the equitability of responses to climate change which emerge from it. As Morgan Robertson writes: “To the extent that the carbon cycle becomes an arena for capital accumulation in carbon markets, we are participants simply by taking a breath, and without the felling of a single tree.” (Robertson, 2012)

What follows will then explore this burgeoning voluntary carbon market (VCM) and specifically the most recent strategies of ‘financialisation’ within it – namely ‘tokenisation’ – through the literatures charted above. I will focus on two case studies which sit within what Max Ritts & Karen Bakker have called the ‘Anthropocene Festival’ and “which collectively model novel forms of environmental governance” (Ritts & Bakker, 2022) through such ‘tokenisation’ technologies. These are the start-up, Single.Earth founded in 2019 and the art-research project terra0 begun in 2016. In doing so I hope to evaluate (1) whether VCMs prioritise financial logics or values over ecological value; (2) what particular interests are being ‘produced’ and served by tokenised carbon markets; (3) how nature is represented and produced in tokenised VCMs; and finally, more provocatively, (4) whether tokenisation schemes can subvert financialised logics and neoliberal solutions to climate change.

Voluntary Carbon Markets & Decentralised Finance

Carbon markets and emissions trading systems (ETSs) have a long and complex history, stretching back to the late 20th Century. Commonly upheld by their supporters as the most efficient way of governing or ‘disincentivising’ polluting activities, ETSs are often cast in opposition to so-called ‘command-and-control’ (CAC) forms of regulation. While CAC seeks to prescribe rules and standards on potential polluters, using sanctions to enforce compliance (European Environment Agency, 2022), ETSs seek to influence behaviour through market-based incentives such as charges, taxes, permits and risk disclosures. (Lane, 2012; Christophers, 2017) That this latter form of regulation is more efficient than CAC has – particularly since the 1980s – become a universal ‘article of faith’ among economists, legal scholars, and policy makers involved in environmental governance. (Cole & Grossman, 1999; Lane, 2012)

As Richard Lane writes, the importance of the economic concept of efficiency has, in recent years, been elevated to a ‘law’ of the social world, one which is taken “to shape, to frame, to determine the viability of environmental regulation” (partly as a consequence of this clash between ETS and CAC approaches). (Lane, 2012) This self-enforced contextualisation of regulatory responses to climate breakdown via the lens of ‘efficiency’ is contested by Lane and others, however such a discussion is outside the scope of this essay. For us this insight helps to contextualise the surprising dominance of ETSs such as VCMs within contemporary responses to climate breakdown and begin to outline the latter’s unique characteristics.

According to the TSVCM, voluntary carbon markets enable organizations to compensate or neutralize emissions ‘not yet eliminated’ from their own operations by purchasing carbon credits which can help finance the avoidance of emissions from other sources, or the removal of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. The purchase of such credits is defined as voluntary on the basis that it is not _motivated by juridical obligations within regulated carbon market schemes (i.e., compliance with regulation), but rather self-imposed targets, such as corporate social responsibility (CSR). Projects which produce voluntary carbon credits, and therefore receive financing from their distribution, have their own independent standards and focus either on GHG _reduction: through, for example, renewable energy production or avoided deforestation; or GHG _removal: _through sequestration projects such as reforestation. (TSVCM, 2021)

This approach to environmental regulation fits neatly into the ambivalent narrative outlined in the introduction above. An explicit project of ‘market design’, VCMs seek to facilitate payments for ecosystem services (such as carbon sequestration) through the commodification of GHG removal and reduction. The carbon credit market therefore operates as a means of pricing, accounting for – or ‘making legible’ – the negative externalities of GHG emissions in the present and the future. Through this form of accounting and investment, writes the TSVCM, “private sector actors [can] take ambitious steps toward compensating for their contribution to climate risk through the purchase and retirement of carbon credits as offsets.” (TSVCM, 2021) In this last statement we can see that a crucial factor in assessing the value, and indeed, the necessity, of these carbon credits is the ability of ‘private sector actors’ to determine the cost of what is referred to here as climate risk.¹ Why else would they purchase _voluntary _carbon credits?

As Brett Christophers writes, climate risk pricing is not just a ‘theoretical concept’ but a “lived, daily, market reality” produced through what are known as ‘climate-related financial disclosures’. In his re-telling of current policies addressing climate risk and financial stability he writes that “the assumption is that effective disclosure of risk in and through financial markets will see investors price that risk in such a (rational) way as to facilitate a smooth and orderly transition of the financial system to a globally warmed world.” (Christophers, 2017)

Throughout his article on the subject Christophers criticizes the emergence of ‘risk disclosure’ and particularly ‘market discipline’ as an appropriate response to climate change and financial instability. In doing so he joins the critics of neoliberal forms of environmental governance discussed above – taking aim at the assumption of a ‘rational’ economic actor disciplined by a market made efficient by ever-more accurate* information*. In his research he has in fact found empirical evidence that – in the specific case of adjusting prices based on climate risk – market actors effectively _ignore _such externalities (Christophers, 2017), a fact which does not bode well for any future VCMs!

This latter point puts into question the_ effectiveness of Dempsey’s construction of ecosystem services _qua political-scientific ‘interest-producing machines’. (Dempsey, 2016) While such strategies may theoretically have the capacity to recognise and produce alternative ‘interests’ through the inclusion of ‘multiple rationalities’, existing market power strongly impacts the capacity for such rationalities to impose market discipline _and therefore alter price adjustments or (market) behaviour _even within _a financialised, neoliberal framework. _As Christophers highlights in the case of climate risk disclosures, the market is not a ‘perfectly competitive domain inhabited by anonymous price-takers’, but rather populated by ‘all-too-real institutional, big-bank or big-investor power’: “It is therefore not a case of the market disciplining; it is a case of market actors with power disciplining those without it…” (Christophers, 2017)

Nevertheless, for financial regulators such as Mark Carney – who sits on both the task force on climate-related financial disclosures (TCFD) and TSVCM – “the fact that market discipline foregrounds financial stability is taken as sufficiently given or axiomatic that it does not even need to be stated.” (Christophers, 2017) Therefore, in his eyes at least, we must assume that problems of ‘market-design’ – such as an asymmetry in market power, or a lack of financial stability – should be resolved by the facilitation of more and better disclosures of information, rather than more interventionist (i.e. CAC) forms of regulation. To return to my first point of evaluation – as to whether VCMs prioritise financial logics over ecological value – it is telling that the TCFDs framing here emphasizes the risks of climate change to financial stability, rather than the risk posed to the climate by finance itself.

By their own admission, the TSVCM and other VCM-advocates acknowledge several challenges within their own approaches to environmental governance, as well as those embedded in the PES projects they seek to fund. Following on from Christophers’ analysis these are, as expected, predominately procedural considerations concerning accurate and efficient information production and management; including double-counting, quality control, liquidity (price signals), transaction costs, and transparency, to name a few. (Kawabata & Acharya, 2020; TSVCM, 2020; Butcher, 2021; UK Voluntary Carbon Markets Forum, 2021)In addition to these technical points there are also concerns around governance; the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) write that many of the challenges in the management of natural resources and maintenance of ecosystem services arise “because of a lack of trust and confidence in the rules governing exchange and possession.” In other words, “can companies’ claims of reduced environmental impact be verified and trusted?” (Sève, et al., 2018)

Digital tokens which utilise decentralised ledger or decentralised finance (DeFi) technologies – such as blockchains, cryptocurrencies or non-fungible tokens (NFTs) – represent a self-assuredly ‘innovative’ approach to traditional carbon offset markets claiming to resolve many, if not all, of these challenges. The United Nations Environment Programme’s (UNEP) Foresight Brief on blockchain technology and environmental sustainability describes a ‘blockchain’ as a shared ledger system resistant to tampering or fraud, one which can provide a trusted and transparent record of transactions. In their view, this allows any form of value – whether that is money, land titles, or even votes – to be stored and transferred in a secure manner: “It is the digital medium for value as the internet was the first digital medium for information.” (Kawabata & Acharya, 2020)

From this perspective, issues of information quality, accounting and transparency are resolved by translating value directly into an open-source digital currency, token or ‘intangible’ asset, the provenance of which is made accessible via a public registry. For those confident in the capacities of crypto-economics this ‘decentralised’ market-design also resolves many issues surrounding governance strategies, as such ‘permissionless platforms’ have no centre of control: “No single entity or government can bring the network down and participants must be incentivised (through tokens) to run and trust the network.” (Sève, et al., 2018) A phrase common to the ‘crypto-community which encapsulates this mindset reads “don’t trust, verify.” (Summers, 2022)

In this way DeFi and tokenisation schemes may be said to counter problems within ETSs (such as VCMs) within a neoliberal frame of reference and, perhaps, as an extension past it into more explicitly libertarian modes of organisation. On the one hand, decentralised systems of governance may (at least notionally) limit the capacity for market power to accrue unevenly; on the other, it seeks to achieve this by incentivizing a certain kind of disclosure via transparent ledgers. In either case, it is clear that such an approach heightens logics of _financialisation _within responses to climate breakdown – not only through the production (or ‘mobilization’) of ‘climate-finance’ but also by increasing opportunities for assetization, ‘rentierification’ and speculation within it. As the ODI note, for example, a key driver in the purchase of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin has been speculation, and this has carried over into token issuances for environmental projects as a “quick and largely unregulated way to raise capital for blockchain projects.” (Sève, et al., 2018)

In sketching out a brief history of voluntary carbon markets along with the problems they face – as understood both inside and outside of the sector – I hope to have contextualised the emergence of tokenisation strategies within them. In an institutional frame of reference dominated by neoliberal ways of thinking, we have seen that faults in governance or ‘market design’ are put down to imperfect forms of information or its management. The effect of this, we might say, is to flatten material responses to climate breakdown into _procedural _questions of pricing and information management, for which information technology solutions, such as blockchains and tokenisation, provide obvious solutions. To continue then, we should turn to examples of such a ‘solution’ in use.

Single Earth

One recent start-up that exemplifies both the possibilities and problematics of DeFi technologies within VCMs and PESs – and therefore the response to climate breakdown as a whole – is Single.Earth.

As alluded to in my introduction, Single.Earth’s stated aims are to contribute towards: (1) limiting global temperatures to 2°C, in line with the Paris Agreement; (2) enhancing ecosystem integrity by valuing nature conservation; (3) facilitating the UN’s sustainable development goals (SDGs) 1, 13 and 15 (ending poverty, climate action, ‘life on land’); and (4) closing the biodiversity financing gap, which they estimate will reach between $598–824 billion per year by 2030. (Single.Earth, 2022)

To this end, in July of 2021, the Tallinn-based start-up secured $7.9 million in funding to, in their own words, “tokenise nature”. (Butcher, 2021) Their plan is to create a ‘nature-backed economy’ with its own cryptocurrency, linking carbon and biodiversity credits to so-called ‘MERIT’ tokens each representing 100kg of CO2e captured in ‘biodiverse nature’. MERITs are issued to landowners “against maintaining and increasing the ecological value and carbon capture of their land” (primarily via carbon sequestration) who may then choose to trade or hold the digital asset. Such credit issuances are verified by “satellite data, big data analysis, and machine learning” which, in their usage and development, contribute towards a ‘digital twin of Earth.’ (Single.Earth, 2022)

In the Single.Earth model, consumers who cannot engage in the generation of MERITs – because they do not own viable land – are encouraged to participate by instead exchanging traditional fiat money for these tokens. Those who perform such an exchange are then issued a MERIT payment card with which they can ‘seamlessly pay’ for goods and services. For each MERIT payment, a fraction of the currency is taken out of circulation (akin to retiring traditional carbon credits) and is described as ‘an irreversible contribution to nature’. In addition to facilitating these ‘contributions’ through participation in the currency, consumers contribute towards the liquidity of the MERIT payments system, creating demand for more tokens and, therefore, additional CO2e offsets – as Single.Earth say: “Every person who switches to MERITs helps to save the world.” (Single.Earth, 2022)

In line with the remit of the TSVCM, this approach is heralded by its founders and investors for its purported scalability, _which is a central focus of Single.Earth’s founders Merit Valdsalu and Andrus Aaslaid. (Butcher, 2021) For example, the automated technologies deployed by the project – such as satellite data collection and machine learning – are, they say, deemed necessary to achieve the “the _scalability required to pipe the finance to nature-based solutions.” (Single.Earth, 2022)

In summary then, spurred on by the TSVCM and legitimated by the same ‘Paris agreement’ narrative we set out from, this project seeks to resolve issues of _governance _(market discipline)_ _through _information production _and _incentivisation _within VCM-schemes through the tokenisation of PES. Simply put, Single.Earth uses “the tools of science, technology, and finance to automatically assess the biodiverse nature [sic] and give it a digital value.” (Single.Earth, 2022)

From this last statement in particular, we might begin to contextualise Single.Earth through Jesse Goldstein’s concept of a ‘non-disruptive disruption’; a set of so-called solutions for ‘planetary improvement’ which, in his view, fail to change the causes of underlying problems (in this case, climate breakdown). (Goldstein, 2018) As he writes, such non-disruptive disruptions are focused only on what is commercially viable and rapidly scalable – two key points of explicit focus within the Single.Earth project – and which only make use of “technologies that fit into the everyday status quo of society, extended perpetually into a future incrementally improved, but never fundamentally transformed.” (Goldstein, 2018)

This critical sentiment is perhaps inadvertently summarised in a Forbes article covering the Single.Earth project (and which is quoted on their website) saying: “Everyone wants to get paid for doing nothing. Novel venture capital group Single Earth has found just the right way for property owners to do exactly that.” (Koetsier, 2021) From this perspective, as the writer Patricia Reed has noted, such an approach “reinforces the Silicon Valley doctrine of what Evgeny Morozov termed ‘solutionism’, wherein problems can be remedied through techno-scientifc innovations alone.” (Reed, 2018)

To loop this critical examination of the project back into our ongoing discussion, let us then ask, in line with Jessica Dempsey, what particular ‘interests’ are being ‘produced’ and served by this specific tokenised carbon market. In a number of ways, it is clear to see how the Single.Earth initiative perfectly aligns with the concept of ‘neoliberal nature’ developed above and, in some cases perhaps extends past it.

Firstly, we can see a clear desire to contextualise the issue of climate change within a mechanism of market discipline and consumer spending. No moral or political case is made against those who may be causing the GHGs requiring offsets via sequestration – as with all voluntary carbon-credits, the assumption here is that these are emissions which could ‘only be eliminated at a prohibitive expense’ within existing decarbonisation efforts, or that are derived from sources which cannot be eliminated at all. (TSVCM, 2021) This understanding echoes the claim from Christophers that, for these institutional actors, “disciplining is strictly financial, not moral” (Christophers, 2017) and contributes towards the depoliticization of responses to climate breakdown. (Levidow, 2020)

However, by expanding their reach into consumer markets via the MERIT currency and payment card, Single.Earth also extend this form of ‘depoliticization by economization’ (Madra & Adaman, 2013) from institutions to individuals. As Reed writes, highlighting the ramifications of Morozov’s ‘solutionism’, such an approach "transforms socio-structural and ideological problems into private, behavioral ones that can be surmounted on one’s own (more discipline!)” (Reed, 2018) In doing so such projects bolster the emphasis of personal responsibility and self-governance required to sustain neoliberal ideology at both institutional and interpersonal levels. As demonstrated by Christophers this is not just a political question of ‘values’, but also an empirical problem of effective responses to climate risk, for which this ‘disclose and discipline’ approach does not have a good record.

Following questions of discipline, depoliticization and individualisation, we might go on to ask whose interests are (re)produced through these political-scientific strategies? Throughout the literature surrounding Single.Earth there is an emphasis on ‘supporting’ landowners and forest owners in the protection of their land and ‘biodiverse nature’ – as one of their taglines reads: “Let’s give forest owners a way for nature protection.” (Single.Earth, 2022) This can be read both as a form of incentivisation and as a ‘solutionist’ technological fix, one which, in addition to financing a certain kind of ‘nature protection’, facilitates new forms of assetization and enclosure, both material and digital.

This idea of enclosure returns us to a more fundamental discourse on representations and ‘productions’ of nature outlined in the introduction above. As Les Levidow has noted, it was not until the ‘enclosure of the commons’ that nature was “recast through metaphors of a mechanism and market.” (Levidow, 2020) Before the 18th century, in western Europe at least, the natural world was understood through shifting organismic representations, developed by communities who maintained common areas of land to which they had fair access. After its enclosure – and the ‘epistemic rift’ which followed – however, “land was turned into an asset for capital accumulation.” (Levidow, 2020; Moore, 2017)

This socio-ecological form of capital accumulation then became the driving force behind European imperial projects on a global scale. As Katz-Rosene & Paterson write, the justification for colonial expansion and control was that it enabled a socio-ecological transformation of land use in line with “European systems of enclosure, private property and agricultural development.” (Katz-Rosene & Paterson, 2020) For many PES projects, particularly those built on forestry conservation and carbon sequestration (highlighted by Single.Earth), this colonial logic remains very much intact, expanding the scope for so-called “green-grabbing” principally in the global South. (Levidow, 2020) Here, land grabs are justified as forms of resource protection (Fairhead, et al., 2012) which can, through the cyclical processes of information-production and financialisation exemplified here, provide modes of accumulation for ‘landowners’ principally in the global north.

The ‘view’ of nature here is then one without_ _people (except for perhaps consumers and landowners), while it may be argued that ecosystems are construed as performative ‘actors’ within a relational network – and, as such, may then hold a seat at the political table – this does nothing to prevent the exclusion of communities who have existing relationships with(in) specific areas of land. This is made no more evident than in the use of satellite imaging techniques that occlude “people, livelihoods and social-ecological relationships from view, rendering lands open to new ‘green’ market uses.” (Fairhead, et al., 2012)

This problem of ‘detachment’ from the biophysical situation that ‘environmental intangibles’ – such as MERITs – aim to care for has been highlighted by Chiapello & Engels. They write that while such detachment serves as a precondition for the commodification, marketability, and flexibility of such environmental assets, it is in fact attachment that ‘guarantees their relevance for the environment’ – that “the greatest flexibility for economic actors comes with a greater detachment, and that this weakens its environmental effectiveness.“ (Chiapello & Engels, 2021)

terra0: An alternate view?

Following on from this question of ‘detachment’, Sian Sullivan writes that a key issue with such schemes is that “payments for the environmental services produced by nature’s labour do not go to the environment itself, but to whoever is able to capture this newly priced value.” (Sullivan, 2009) What, then, if we were to try and conceptualise a more ‘integrated’ scheme, one which allowed an environment – in this case a forest – to profit from, or financialise, itself?

terra0 is an ongoing art project initiated by a “a group of developers, theorists, and researchers exploring the creation of hybrid ecosystems in the technosphere.” (terra0, 2022) In their 2016 white paper, Paul Seidler, Paul Kolling and Max Hampshire asked precisely this question: “Can an augmented forest own and utilise itself?” (Seidler, et al., 2016) Their proposal seeks to augment a forest such that it can accumulate capital autonomously, selling licences to log trees through ‘automated processes, smart contracts and Blockchain technology’ as an ‘autonomous decentralized agent.’

Here we come to the final point of evaluation – whether tokenisation schemes can subvert the financialised logics and neoliberal solutions to climate change critically interpreted thus far, in which, as Fairhead et al. write: “[c]onceptualisations of ecological and human-ecological relationships, and of interconnectedness in systems, give way to the notion that their components, facets and attributes can be separated as ecosystem ‘services’ and so sold”. (Fairhead, et al., 2012) Does an autonomous decentralized agent constitute a challenge to ‘neoliberal natures’? Is nature constructed any differently through this approach?

In many ways the terra0 proposal conforms to the ideas and projects outlined above – the authors evoke a language of ecosystem services identifying the forest’s role as both a source of raw material and ‘service contractor’. However, in doing so, they hold on to the central tenets of actor-network theory much more effectively than Single.Earth and other ‘tokenisation’ schemes, writing: “If culture is understood as the counterpart to nature, by which one recognises nature's 'otherness', then nature must be conceptualised not as being spatially separated from humans, […] but instead as immanent within culture.” (Seidler, et al., 2016) Elsewhere they go further, writing that, on this basis, “there is no good case to believe that nature […] still exists.” (Seidler, et al., 2016) As Ritts & Bakker write in their summarisation of the project: “Terra0 generates a governance space reflexively understood as never fully being within the human order, but as component of a socio/techno/natural assemblage.” (Ritts & Bakker, 2022)

Such an understanding of nature is formalised in their criteria of an autonomous decentralized agent – that “[w]hen interacting with humans the agent does so as a peer, not as a tool.” (Seidler, et al., 2016) An approach to PES which removes ‘forest owners’ (as mediators between tokens-as-tools and opportunities for capital accumulation) might then push this fintech framework beyond Goldstein’s category of ‘nondisruptive-disruptions’ into a speculatively ‘subversive’ space. Not only would this fundamentally alter the ‘calculative mechanisms that constitute’ capitalist practice (MacKenzie, 2009), but might also offer opportunities for reconfiguring colonial practices and knowledges wherever the forest spreads. (Parry, 2020)

While I feel it is productive to view terra0 within the lineage of more ‘legitimate’ or ‘institutional’ proposals, that is not this project’s ‘natural’ home. To return to Ritts & Bakker’s concept of the Anthropocene Festival, this ‘novel form of environmental governance’ emerges through a tension between the worlds of art and environmental policy – a kind of ‘creative digression.’ (Ritts & Bakker, 2022) If strategies of tokenisation in the context of VCMs and PES can provide any productive contributions towards an equitably financialised response to climate breakdown (if those are indeed the parameters we are forced to operate within), it seems most likely, given the journey charted here, that these will not emerge from within traditional policy taskforces or even ‘bleeding-edge’ technological developments; but rather, a re-examination of “the imperatives, interests, and intentions built into its networked models of sociality” (Ritts & Bakker, 2022) that I hope to have contributed to here.

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Footnotes

1. Climate risk is defined by the IPCC as the “potential for adverse consequences for human or ecological systems”, either as a result of climate change or human responses to it. (Reisinger, et al., 2020) ↩